By The Associated Press
The Associated Press
Friday, January 5, 2007; 9:29 PM

-- Nikki Bacharach

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) _ Nikki Bacharach, daughter of Burt Bacharach and Angie Dickinson, died Thursday. She was 40.

Bacharach committed suicide at her condo, said Linda Dozoretz, a spokeswoman for the family. She suffered from Asperger's Disorder, a form of autism.

Bacharach died of suffocation using a plastic bag and helium, said Mike Feiler of the Ventura County coroner's office.

Born prematurely in 1966, Lea Nikki Bacharach studied geology at Cal Lutheran University, but could not pursue a career in the field because of poor eyesight.

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Michael Browning

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) _ Michael Browning, a journalist with The Palm Beach Post whose career spanned three decades across several continents with several Florida newspapers, died Saturday. He was 58.

Browning died of liver failure at a Gainesville hospital, according to the Post.

Browning began his career in 1975 with The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville and later spent 20 years at The Miami Herald, nine of them in Asia as the newspaper's Beijing bureau chief. He traveled extensively, reporting throughout India, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam, Mongolia, South Korea and South Africa. Browning spoke fluent Latin, Greek and Mandarin.

He joined the Post in 1999. In 2004, he won Florida's top honor for newspaper writing, the Paul Hansell Award, for stories in the Post that included a series of articles about caring for his ailing mother until her death.

Browning was born in Valdosta, Ga., on Oct. 28, 1948, and later moved with his family to Jacksonville in 1950. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Columbia University, where he majored in Latin, minored in Greek and planned to become a teacher until the U.S. Army drafted him out of graduate school in 1972.

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Mary Frampton

MALIBU, Calif. (AP) _ Mary Frampton, a former newspaper photographer and organizer of the Save Our Coast environmental organization, died Dec. 29. She was 76.

Frampton died at her home, her friend and attorney John Murdock said. The cause of death wasn't known.

Frampton shot mostly feature photos from 1956 to 1987 as one of the first female staff photographers at the Los Angeles Times. She was a key environmental figure in Malibu, battling developers and working to preserve open space and protect marine life.

Born in New York, Frampton moved with her parents to San Bernardino where her mother Edithe Hethcock was a sculptor and her father Eugenio Nogueras was editor and publisher of a weekly Spanish-language newspaper, El Sol de San Bernardino.

Frampton started taking pictures as a child. She attended San Bernardino Valley College and got her first photography job in 1950 at what is now the San Bernardino Sun.

She moved on to the Santa Monica Evening Outlook in 1954, then was hired by the Times two years later as a staff photographer.

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Seymour Martin Lipset

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) _ Seymour Martin Lipset, an influential social scientist interested in the peculiarities of U.S. political culture, died Sunday. He was 84.

He died in Arlington of complications from a stroke, his wife said.

Lipset studied the nature of political extremism, and how the core American values of equality and achievement keep class conflict in check.

He also first explained the connection between economic development and democracy, an insight that earned him attention from journalists, policymakers and academics.

Lipset was the only person to have been president of both the American Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association.

He was the author of more than 20 books and editor of two dozen more. One of his early books, "Political Man" (1960), sold more than 400,000 copies and was translated into 20 languages. Another, "The First New Nation" (1962), was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Lipset held prestigious academic positions at Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford and George Mason universities, as well as the Hoover Institution and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

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John Lust

BUTLER, N.J. (AP) _ John Lust, who apparently was the last surviving crew member from the Navy's disaster-prone rigid airship program of the 1920s and 1930s, died Dec. 29. He was 94.

Lust enlisted in the Navy at 17, a few years after the 1925 crash of the rigid, blimp-like USS Shenandoah. Unlike the flexible blimps that fly over sporting events, the rigid airships had internal frames.

Despite that disaster over southern Ohio, which killed 14, Lust went to work running engines on the airships, first on the USS Los Angeles, then on the USS Akron, which was based in Lakehurst.

Lust was on leave recovering from injuries he sustained in a car accident when the Akron crashed into the sea off Long Beach Island on April 3, 1933. Seventy-three of the 76 men aboard died. Within two years, the Navy ended its rigid-hulled airship program. It was two years after that that a similar airship, the Hindenburg, burned at Lakehurst.

Navy Lakehurst Historical Society said it had checked the records of every crew member from the Naval rigid-hulled airship program and confirmed that Lust was the last to die.

Lust went on to run a lumber-supply company and was active with the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society.

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Ahmed Hadi Naji

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) _ The body of Ahmed Hadi Naji, an Associated Press employee, was found shot in the back of the head Friday. He was 28.

The circumstances of Naji's death were unclear. He was last seen leaving for work six days ago by his family.

Naji was the fourth AP staffer to die violently in the Iraq war and the second AP employee killed in less than a month. He had been a messenger and occasional cameraman for the AP for 2 1/2 years.

"All of us at AP share the pain and grief being felt by Ahmed's family and friends," said AP President and CEO Tom Curley. "The situation for our journalists in Iraq is unprecedented in AP's 161-year history of covering wars and conflicts. The courage of our Iraqi colleagues and their dedication to the story stand as an example to the world of journalism's enduring value."

Naji's wife, Sahba'a Mudhar Khalil, reported him missing Dec. 30 when he did not return that evening. He had left home by motorcycle in the Ashurta Al Khamsa District in southwest Baghdad at 10:30 a.m., telling her he was going to the AP office. Naji's body was found in a morgue.

In addition to his wife, Naji is survived by 4-month-old twins, a boy, Zaid, and a girl, Rand.

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Joel Roux-Neville

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) _ Joel Roux-Neville, the wife of R&B singer Aaron Neville, died Friday after a long battle with lung cancer. She was 66.

Roux-Neville was first diagnosed with the disease in 2004 and at that time was given three months to live. She died at the couple's home south of Nashville surrounded by family members, said her husband's spokesman Jerry Digney.

The high school sweethearts would have celebrated their 48th wedding anniversary on Wednesday, Digney said.

Aaron Neville had returned home shortly before Christmas to be with his wife following a nationwide concert tour.

The couple moved to the Nashville area in 2005 shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated their hometown of New Orleans.

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Marais Viljoen

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) _ Marais Viljoen, who in the 1980s held what was then South Africa's largely ceremonial post of president in the apartheid state, died Thursday, a news agency reported. He was 91.

Viljoen's daughter, Elna Meyer, told the South African Press Association that her father had died of heart failure after being admitted to a Pretoria hospital more than a week ago.

Viljoen was president between 1979 and 1984. Under a new constitution in 1984, the presidency became more powerful, and P.W. Botha was elected to the post that year. Botha, South Africa's last hard-line white president, died last year at the age of 90.

Viljoen also held several Cabinet posts under Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd, who was regarded as the architect of apartheid.